A Seven-Day Las Cruces School That Stopped Shopping for Software

Frost Aviation Services has run a flight school at Las Cruces International Airport (KLRU) in southern New Mexico for more than 21 years, and it flies seven days a week. Before Sky Schedule, the school had worked its way through a long list of scheduling platforms without finding one that fit. What finally stuck was software set up around the way the owners run their school, backed by a support team that answers when a seven-day operation needs something.

Twenty-one years at Las Cruces International

Frost's promise is simple: affordable rates, good airplanes, and excellent instructors, with every effort made to stretch a student's training dollar. The fleet is all Piper. Archers and Warriors carry primary training, some with traditional six-pack panels and others with Garmin G3X glass. A Pilot 100i serves as an instrument trainer, flown dual with a CFII. A Piper Aztec handles multi-engine training, flown only with an MEI. Two technically advanced aircraft give single-engine commercial students the 10 hours of complex, turbine, or TAA time that 14 CFR 61.129 requires.

The lead instructor is a Gold Seal CFI who holds an ATP along with CFII and MEI ratings. The programs run from Private Pilot through Instrument, Commercial, Multi-Engine, and every instructor certificate, plus flight reviews, IPCs, and training for helicopter pilots transitioning to fixed wing.

The student wall on Frost's website tells the rest. Las Cruces Public Schools students and Junior ROTC cadets have trained there, some on scholarships. Graduates fly for Delta, SkyWest, Southwest, and NetJets.

Scheduler after scheduler

Frost had been running a busy school on too many tools. Scheduling lived in one place, student records in another, and billing in a third. Reporting was assembled by hand.

That kind of patchwork is hard on any school. It is harder on one that flies every day of the week, mixing first lessons with instrument checks, multi-engine training in the Aztec, and rotor pilots learning to land an airplane. Another workaround was not going to hold, and another generic setup was not going to fit.

Set up the way the school flies

Frost put scheduling, billing, student progress, reporting, fleet maintenance, and lead tracking in Sky Schedule. The owners shaped the setup around how they already run the school.

Reservation types that match the flying

Custom reservation types reflect the real mix on the schedule, so a primary lesson, a multi-engine flight, and a rental each carry the details that matter for that kind of flight.

Student progress in the same record

Training progress lives next to the schedule. Instructors log lessons from the booking, and students and staff can see where each student stands in their program. Endorsements are tracked with their expiration dates. Our training records page shows how that fits together.

Maintenance on the same screen as the bookings

Squawks, work orders, and inspection due dates sit with the fleet in Sky Schedule. When a squawk grounds an airplane, the schedule shows it and the dispatch report calls the flight a no-go until the work order is completed, so nobody has to remember which airplane is down.

A support team that answers

Software is only half of it for a school that never takes a day off. What set Sky Schedule apart for Frost was a team that stays involved and answers quickly, which is what Denise Frost points to when she compares it with everything the school tried before.

Frost Aviation Services now runs dispatch, scheduling, training, and maintenance in one system. The search for the next scheduler is over.

“I've tried 27 different scheduling softwares. No joke. Sky Schedule is by far the best. The team is super interactive, and the response is immediate.”